NEW YORK'S GOOBERHEAD MAYOR
Time for another Gooberhead Award – presented periodically to those in the news who have their tongues going 100-miles-an-hour... but who forgot to put their brains in gear.
Today's Goober is Michael Bloomberg, the billioniare mayor of the Big Apple. Hizzoner was in the national spotlight during August's Republican National Convention in New York City – and the glare revealed some very ugly wrinkles inside his soul. Bloomberg showed himself to be stunningly callous to our country's most fundamental liberty – the right to assemble in public and speak out about any and all policies with which we disagree. He used the New York police as a bludgeon to crackdown on dissenters who were engaged in totally lawful protests, then, he asserted that "every NYPD officer did a great job."
Alex Pincus definitely disagrees. He wasn't even a protester – just a city resident who went out to a deli for some matzo ball soup and innocently walked into a police dragnet that was indiscriminately scooping up hundreds of people. Pincus asked an officer how to get out of the way, was told "follow me" – then was grabbed by cops, handcuffed behind his back, forced to keel for an hour before being tossed into a filthy make-shift cage topped with razor wire, where he was held for 25 hours without access to a lawyer. Bloomberg's police kept saying to him and all the others, "This is what you get for protesting."
Oblivious to America's hard-won constitutional rights, the mayor later admitted that innocents were abused, but the Gooberhead blamed the victims: "If you go to where people are protesting and don't want to be part of the protest," he haughtily sniffed, "you're always going to run the risk that maybe you'll be tied up with it." Yeah, literally tied up!
Our liberties are not taken from us in one big bang of a coup, but slipped out from under us inch by inch by autocratic Goobers like Bloomberg.
"Arrests at GOP Convention Are Criticized," New York Times, September 20, 2004.
Jim Hightower
Hightower & Associates
1802 W. 6th Street
Austin, TX 78703
Today's Goober is Michael Bloomberg, the billioniare mayor of the Big Apple. Hizzoner was in the national spotlight during August's Republican National Convention in New York City – and the glare revealed some very ugly wrinkles inside his soul. Bloomberg showed himself to be stunningly callous to our country's most fundamental liberty – the right to assemble in public and speak out about any and all policies with which we disagree. He used the New York police as a bludgeon to crackdown on dissenters who were engaged in totally lawful protests, then, he asserted that "every NYPD officer did a great job."
Alex Pincus definitely disagrees. He wasn't even a protester – just a city resident who went out to a deli for some matzo ball soup and innocently walked into a police dragnet that was indiscriminately scooping up hundreds of people. Pincus asked an officer how to get out of the way, was told "follow me" – then was grabbed by cops, handcuffed behind his back, forced to keel for an hour before being tossed into a filthy make-shift cage topped with razor wire, where he was held for 25 hours without access to a lawyer. Bloomberg's police kept saying to him and all the others, "This is what you get for protesting."
Oblivious to America's hard-won constitutional rights, the mayor later admitted that innocents were abused, but the Gooberhead blamed the victims: "If you go to where people are protesting and don't want to be part of the protest," he haughtily sniffed, "you're always going to run the risk that maybe you'll be tied up with it." Yeah, literally tied up!
Our liberties are not taken from us in one big bang of a coup, but slipped out from under us inch by inch by autocratic Goobers like Bloomberg.
"Arrests at GOP Convention Are Criticized," New York Times, September 20, 2004.
Jim Hightower
Hightower & Associates
1802 W. 6th Street
Austin, TX 78703
posted by R7 | 10/13/2004 05:53:00 PM
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